Topsy: The Startling Story of the Crooked-Tailed Elephant, P. T. Barnum, and the American Wizard, Thomas Edison

by Michael Daly

  That summer, Edison twice visited the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, which was officially meant to mark the ascendency of America and became a celebration of all things electric. His host on both occasions was Luther Stieringer, the former lab aide turned lighting designer who had added a splash of color to the white blaze in Chicago. He was the chief lighting designer of the show in Buffalo, which not only outdid Chicago in sheer numbers of bulbs, but also was multihued throughout, not a White City but a Rainbow City. Edison replied with a superlative that was considerably ahead of its time.

  “This is out of sight!”

  Edison was equally excited by the work-in-progress he brought to the exposition, a new storage battery that would hold a charge considerably longer than those presently on the market, yet weighed half as much. He guaranteed it would revitalize the automobile industry, providing with its very use the means to transport direct current great distances.

  “This new Edison battery will be the apparatus or machine to carry the power of the falls thousands of places,” a local reporter rhapsodized.

  The partly completed battery was displayed in the electricity pavilion. Edison could not have been happy to see a WESTINGHOUSE sign there that was so big one of the smaller companies had gone to court in an unsuccessful bid to have it reduced.

  Edison also displayed his latest phonograph, refined to provide even better entertainment. He no doubt fully approved when the well-heeled overseers of the exposition declared that Rainbow City was intended to be primarily educational, a “colossal university . . . instructive of the best of the arts and trades and sciences.” His roving film crew had been there to capture the opening ceremonies. The short clip Opening, Pan-American Exposition showed then–vice president Theodore Roosevelt leading the procession.

  Among the subsequent films was Pan-American Exposition by Night, which opens with a daylight panorama. The sweep stops with the camera centered on the electric tower, which was being described as the exposition’s “crowning centerpiece.” Nobody was calling this one the Edison Tower, but the Wizard’s crew was there to capture it as nightfall brought what his film catalogue would term “the coming up of the lights, an event which was deemed by all to be a great emotional climax.” The culminating moment comes as the searchlights atop the tower pierce the darkness from high above the exposition’s vast array of other lights.

  “The effect is startling,” the catalogue says, going on to sound like a circus courier. “The picture is pronounced by the photographic profession to be a marvel in photography, and by theatrical people to be the greatest winner in panoramic views ever placed before the public.”

  The footage did as much as black and white was able to capture the out-of-sight thrill of the Rainbow City. Another Edison film, Panoramic View of Electric Tower from a Balloon, begins with the gushing fountains at the foot of the tower and gradually rises until it reaches the figure the Goddess of Light at the top, then seems to descend.

  “Here we have recorded a very novel scene, the camera having been placed in the basket of the captive balloon at the Pan-American Exposition,” the Edison film catalogue would say. “It was then slowly elevated to the top of the Tower, a distance of 465 feet, and slowly lowered until it reached the ground, keeping the Tower in view all the time during the ascent and descent, ending with a very interesting view of the base of the Tower, with crowds of people passing to and fro.”

  In fact, the crew had engaged in a little humbug such as Forepaugh and Barnum might have mounted had they gone into movie making, creating the illusion of ascent and descent simply by tilting the camera slowly up and down.

  What was missing from the initial films of the exposition was something that had been crucial to all the plans: a crowd. The exposition had everything except one essential quality, that being popular appeal. Edification was hardly proving to be a huge draw. Attendance was falling considerably short of expectations with an accompanying shortfall in revenue that resulted in it being termed a “glorious blaze of financial failure.”

  To the rescue came Frederic Thompson, who had been a janitor at the Chicago fair and had noted that the midway attractions there generally outdrew the main exhibits. He had put that observation to work at a smaller exposition in Omaha, when he took over a California mine exhibit that had gone defunct because, in his words, “it had nothing in it to thrill.” He put a group of comely, brightly lit dancers on a rooftop stage and filled the facsimile mine shaft below with ghoulish items befitting someone who happened to have been born on Halloween. The reconceived Heaven and Hell was a big hit.

  Thompson toyed with the idea of adding a fiery pit to hell at the next fair, and that raised the question of how to transport the customers across it. The answer that came to him was “airship.” He then decided that an airship could be a show in itself. But where would it go?

  Thompson arrived at the Pan-American Exposition planning to operate both Heaven and Hell and an elaborate virtual ride he called Trip to the Moon. He thereupon discovered that Elmer “Skip” Dundy, the son of an Omaha federal judge, had filed plans for a show identical to Heaven and Hell, having copied what he had seen at his hometown’s fair. Thompson challenged him, but Dundy had grown up around lawyers and prevailed. Thompson was more impressed than angry and the two became partners in both concessions.

  Trip to the Moon was now proving to be one of the most popular attractions at the Buffalo exposition’s midway. The exposition’s hierarchy initially dismissed Thompson’s ride as a common, somewhat vulgar diversion, a barely tolerable trifling of true science. Thompson was very clear regarding his opinion of the Rainbow City.

  “Architecturally and from an educational standpoint this exposition was one of the most remarkable in all the history of world’s fairs,” Thompson later wrote. “It was beautiful; it was tremendous; but it wasn’t paying.”

  Thompson went to his supposed betters on the exposition’s executive committee.

  “[I] told them why their outlay of millions of dollars was attracting only thirty thousand people a day. I told them they were failing miserably because there wasn’t a regular showman in the lot. I told them about the carnival spirit, and they came back by telling me about the educational value of the exposition.”

  Thompson posed a question.

  “What’s the use of a college if there are not students?”

  Thompson made a proposal.

  “I suggested that they turn over the show to me for one day, which would be sufficient to test what the executive gentlemen were pleased to call my theories.”

  The committee scoffed, but its president overruled them, granting Thompson a day that was less than a fortnight hence.

  “The exposition was to be mine for August 3,” Thompson wrote, “and I told them that it would be known as ‘Midway Day.’”

  He had little time and much to do.

  “Within six hours after the final interview I had four printing houses at work getting out the paper with which I was going to plaster the country.”

  He would be promoting the exposition just as regular showmen such as Barnum and Forepaugh and Bailey promoted their shows.

  “I and my sideshow associates sent ten advance men on the road to herald the coming of the big day, and within a week a large part of the eastern half of the United States was screaming: ‘August third! Midway Day at the Pan-American! Don’t miss it!’”

  The litanies of the posters and newspaper ads could have been composed by Barnum.

  “Marvels for the Millions!”

  “Mirth for the Masses!”

  On the appointed day, attendance jumped from thirty thousand to one hundred forty-two thousand, not counting the ten thousand who rushed in without paying before the police were able to summon reinforcements.

  “How was it done?” Thompson would write. “By paying no attention to Machinery Hall
, the architectural beauty of the State Building, or the interesting exhibits of Trade and Industry; and by smearing signboards of forty-five states with the carnival spirit. Instead of advertising an organ concert in Music Hall we yelled ourselves hoarse about high diving, greased poles, parades, and every other crazy thing we could think of.”

  At the exposition’s opening, three thousand carrier pigeons had been released with invitations to world leaders. The sky now filled with ten thousand pigeons with a message to “the rest of mankind.” They were joined by an actual hot air balloon that rose two thousand feet as a couple got married in its basket. Thompson stretched a long rope from the top of the electric tower and sent the renowned daredevil known by the single name Cameroni up to perch beside the Goddess of Light. Cameroni proceeded to upstage Her.

  “I had a man sliding by his teeth from the top of the sky-scraping electric tower to the esplanade below. True, he had never before traveled more than thirty feet in that fashion, but we tied him on, so there was no danger. The illusion was great, and the stunt made a sensation.”

  The path of Cameroni’s descent extended to an arena that had been modeled after the Panathenaic arena of two millennia past, in keeping with the executive committee’s educational goal.

  “To the stadium, which had never held a quarter of its capacity, I drew 23,000 people to see a race contested by an ostrich, a camel, an elephant, a man on a bicycle, another on a horse, an automobile, and a zebra.”

  At the pistol shot signaling the start of the race, the zebra bolted, followed by the camel. One observer would later say the scene looked like the wreck of a circus train. The eventual winner was the man on the horse, a cowboy. The bicycle came in second, followed by the camel and the elephant.

  The elephant was Big Liz, said by her owner to be Jumbo’s widow and with her husband’s demise “the largest elephant in captivity.” The owner, Frank Bostock, the self-proclaimed Animal King, had lost most of his menagerie earlier that year in a fire in Baltimore started by faulty insulation in an electric wire, with little else surviving beyond what he termed a “pack of hounds” and a pair of “sacred donkeys” that purportedly once wandered the Holy Land. He told the press he had hoped to display a buffalo that could walk the tightrope and do the high jump, but sadly it had died en route to the exposition. He had retained a twenty-six-inch woman, purported to be the world’s smallest. Chiquita the Doll Lady, also known as the Living Doll and the Tiny Atom of Cuban Humanity, was said to be the daughter of a wealthy Cuban sugar planter who had been murdered by the dastardly Spanish along with the rest of her family. She was further said to have visited the White House to thank President McKinley personally for giving Cuba its freedom from Spain, receiving a white flower in return.

  The six-ton Big Liz and the 18.5-pound Chiquita were star attractions of a Midway Day parade worthy of a great circus. There was talk that Thompson would ride Big Liz, but he was substituted atop the elephant by a cage containing a lion. The Living Doll rode in a tiny electric car, a miniature portent of Edison’s promised revolution. The most curious feature of the procession, one no circus had offered, was an oblong green and white object about the size of a small steamship featuring a pair of wood and canvas wings. The “airship” Luna was then hung back on its guy wires inside the encompassing 34,000-square-foot building that housed the Trip to the Moon.

  Every fifteen minutes there, a new batch of thirty customers paid their fifty cents and entered an auditorium where a “professor” gave them a brief lecture on “anti-gravity” such as the educationally minded executive committee would have endorsed had it been based at all on fact. The travelers then entered the Luna, which swayed on its wires as if floating on air. The wings began to beat. The ship was caused to vibrate. Concealed fans generated a rush of air to approximate acceleration. The cabin filled with roaring noises. Scrolled scenery flashed past the portholes to offer the illusion of ascending above the fair until all that was seen of Buffalo were the lights for which it wanted to be famous. The fantasy’s flight path continued over Niagara Falls and then slipped into darkness suddenly torn by flashing lights and sounds like thunder.

  “We are going through a storm,” the captain announced. “We are quite safe.”

  The ship proceeded up into space until it soon came to the moon. The customers exited the other end to enter a lunar cavern, where they were greeted by midget barb-backed moon creatures speaking Luna-ese. Moon maidens in a green cheese room offered morsels plucked from the walls. Giants stood guard at the palace where the Man in the Moon resided.

  Among the many visitors to the ride was Julian Hawthorne, son of the novelist and grandson of the ship’s mate who had recorded in the log the journey that brought the first elephant to America. Hawthorne was in Buffalo to describe his journey to the moon for Cosmopolitan magazine.

  “Elaborate illusionism ingeniously carried out instead of being a performance on a stage so that instead of viewing a performance we are participants,” he would write.

  Edison himself came to the ride during his second visit to the exposition, curiosity apparently having overcome his usual aversion to fantasy. He chatted with Thompson, who used electricity in powering many of the ride’s special effects and who was bent on becoming the Wizard of Entertainment.

  Edison may have been expected to place this would-be entertainment mogul even lower than a speculator, but the boldness and freshness of Thompson’s ideas apparently aroused an improbable respect, as if indeed from one wizard to another.

  “Thomas Edison expressed his wonder and delight at the electric miracles Mr. Thompson has performed,” the local press reported.

  After Edison’s departure, the ride’s highlights were memorialized by his film crew, which was also on hand during the first week of September for the arrival of one draw that almost matched the Midway Day. A crowd of 116,000 was on hand to see President McKinley, who had been urged to visit by Roosevelt. McKinley was treated to a fireworks display that featured outlines of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. It culminated in a message spelled out in the night sky.

  “WELCOME PRESIDENT MCKINLEY CHIEF OF OUR NATION AND OUR EMPIRE.”

  The Edison crew filmed McKinley addressing the crowd and reviewing troops at the stadium. The crew predictably skipped the president’s visit the next morning, September 6, to the Niagara Power Project, built by Westinghouse with Tesla technology to power the whole city of Buffalo along with the exposition. McKinley pronounced the generating plant “the marvel of the electric age.”

  McKinley then returned to the fair and the Temple of Music, where thousands waited in line for the chance to meet him. The Edison crew set up outside, figuring on capturing the happy tumult that seemed sure to accompany the president’s exit through the crowd.

  McKinley was inside shaking hands when a self-proclaimed anarchist named Leon Czolgosz stepped up and shot him twice in the stomach. The gunman might have kept firing had a citizen named James Benjamin Parker not punched him and knocked the small revolver from his hand.

  The Edison crew missed the assassination itself but was able to film the scene outside. The catalogue would engage in a little more humbug, saying that in The Mob Outside the Temple of Music After the President Was Shot, “guards are plainly seen in the background trying to check the frantic multitude as they sway backward and forward in their mad endeavor to reach the assassin,” though it is not at all plain to see and the crowd seems to be too stunned to be bent on anything.

  The ambulance that rushed McKinley away off-camera was electric-powered, but the operating room at the fair’s hospital, being outside all public view, had not been wired. People had to hold up a mirror to catch the light of the late afternoon sun coming through the windows and deflect it onto the table as a gynecologist performed emergency surgery, both the president’s personal physician and the exposition’s medical director being unavailable. The operation ended w
ith one of the two bullets still lodged somewhere in McKinley, and Edison announced from his laboratory in New Jersey that he was sending an X-ray machine he was developing. The machine arrived with a team of technicians but missing a part, and there was a great scramble to secure it. A test was then conducted and the device proved capable of locating a nickel placed under the back of a man of the same considerable girth as the president.

  But McKinley seemed to be on the mend and the doctors decided to spare him the exertion of positioning himself for an X-ray. He then took a sudden turn for the worse as gangrene set in. He died eight days after being shot.

  The Edison X-ray crew returned to New Jersey. The Edison movie crew made a series of short films of McKinley’s body being ceremoniously transported to Washington and then on to his hometown, ending with Funeral Cortege Entering Westlawn Cemetery at Canton, Ohio. Edison was denied permission to film the convicted assassin being led into the execution chamber at Auburn Prison on October 29. His crew settled for a mix of reality and staging, splicing an exterior shot of the prison with a reenactment of Czolgosz being strapped into the electric chair, which Edison had helped bring into being. The resulting film was titled Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama of Auburn Prison.

  On returning to the Pan-American, the Edison crew nearly had an opportunity to film an actual, and exceedingly public, execution on the exposition grounds, albeit one less directly related to the assassination.

  McKinley’s death had turned the exposition into a murder scene and dampened the gaiety that Thompson rightly said was needed for success. Attendance fell to educational levels and Buffalo was relinquishing its dream of being the Electric City central to the American Empire.

  Exhibitors clamored to display the heroic Parker on the Midway, figuring the man who had saved the president’s life at least for a time could bolster sagging attendance and turn the tragedy into a tale of bravery. Parker proved actually to be as noble as he was described. He declined.